>>Night owl,
"Surely there must be some glimmer of hope that Iraq will present a better outcome <<
My name's not Shirley.
I do agree, though. There's certainly enough money there to assure that Iraq can become a secular democracy of committed humanists like we got in 1965 after liberating Alabama.
Emphasis shifts to liberating Iraqis
By Anne E. Kornblut and Susan Milligan, Globe Staff, 4/3/2003
WASHINGTON -- Bush administration officials have scaled back how much they talk about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, preparing for the possibility that it may take weeks or even months to determine whether Saddam Hussein was in fact stockpiling chemical and biological arms -- one of the administration's main justifications for going to war.
Over the last week, President Bush has shifted his emphasis on disarming Iraq to helping liberate the Iraqi people, a strategy his advisers said is partly designed to capitalize on the stories of torture and rape that are emerging from the country.
At the same time, an administration official said, it is important for Bush ''not to talk up the biological and chemical weapons thing while troops are in the field,'' for fear of giving the impression that a chemical or biological attack would dampen US morale -- thus providing loyal Iraqi generals a strategic reason to use them.
But administration officials also recognize that they are still missing the ''smoking gun'' that prompted the attack on Iraq in the first place.
If the weapons are never found -- or found after the United States has controlled the country for a long period, fueling speculation that they were planted -- the administration will at a minimum be very embarrassed, several Republican operatives said.
If the war goes badly, or terrorist attacks on troops during an occupation lead to numerous casualties, the failure to find any banned stockpiles could become a political and diplomatic liability for the administration.
Although officials remain confident they will find caches of weapons of mass destruction, they say they are trying to put that mission in a larger context, reminding the public that it is only one of many goals in their plan for Iraq -- along with freeing the people, installing democracy, bringing humanitarian assistance, and transforming oil fields into revenue producers that benefit Iraqis.
At the moment, US officials said, they are more concerned about taking Baghdad and insist that finding banned weapons ''is not what the troops are there to do now.''
''You talk about the thing that's on people's minds, and what's on people's minds is defeating the regime,'' the administration official said. ''Would we want to find them [the weapons of mass destruction] right now? Of course. But we're not counting on it.''
Evidence was released this week that some Islamic militants in northern Iraq may have been developing such weapons, but the region was not under Hussein's control.
Three thousand chemical suits and gas masks, along with atropine -- an antidote for nerve gas -- were uncovered last week in a hospital in central Iraq. It was unclear whether they dated to the Iran-Iraq war or had been acquired more recently.
Special forces chem-bio exploitation teams have been scouring sites suspected of being part of the prohibited chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs, but have not found conclusive evidence.
US officials stress, however, that they are most likely to find a smoking gun in Baghdad and near Tikrit to the north. That territory is not under the control of coalition forces.
On Capitol Hill, some Democrats said the nation would face diplomatic problems if none are found.
''There were many rationales for this war, but the one that was most consistent and compelling was that we needed to disarm Saddam Hussein before he could use his weapons of mass destruction,'' said Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who voted against using force in Iraq. ''If weapons of mass destruction are not found, it will further damage the US reputation in the international community.''
Graham, the former cochairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he believes Hussein has amassed banned weapons but has hidden them near Baghdad.
Graham said he based his assessment on classified briefings from intelligence officials, who he said had described ''a very large number of sites'' where weapons were suspected to be concealed.
''I think they have to find them shortly after the fall of Baghdad'' to convince allies that US and British concerns were justified, said Representative William D. Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat who also voted against the Iraq resolution.
But Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said finding the weapons of mass destruction is ''not as important as it might appear on the surface,'' depending on how Iraqis react to a coalition victory.
''Having weapons of mass destruction would be nice for their rationale -- though there will be plenty of people who believe it was planted -- but freeing people from brutality is in some ways a more powerful rationale,'' he said.
''Let's say we don't find much,'' Ornstein continued, ''but at the same time we end up with, when the country is secured, a literal parade of people emerging saying, `Thank God you have jackbooted this dictator from around our necks,' and a parade of stories of rape, murder, and the like. That will make the WMD issue a little less potent.''
This story ran on page A31 of the Boston Globe on 4/3/2003
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